The importance of video marketing cannot be overemphasized, particularly when considering the wealth of pure SEO benefits it gives you. When you really need to make your organization sustainable by bringing in more earnings, you need to perfect your search engine optimization strategies to ensure greater visibility and conspicuousness in the Internet. Video SEO is something you need to capitalize on. Here’s why.
Why is an Online Video Important to Your Marketing?
Online video can help your site acquire more links and views. When your target audience searches for keywords related to the services you offer, your website would pop up prominently in the results just because of the video it contains. You know there’s the video search option in Google. And even in the regular search, video results come up often, especially when people search for procedures such as checking blood pressure, changing a flat tire, preparing some great recipe, etc. Google values the presence of video since it can help people understand stuff better.
The presence of an explainer video in your site helps boost the other SEO factors once people enter your site. The explainer video helps:
- Reduce the bounce rate of your website
- Increase the dwell time of users in your site, and
- Improve the click-through rate (CTR)
All of these contribute to even higher rankings for your web page.
The Twin Advantages of Video
Video therefore performs a two-fold function:
- It helps your site rank well for the right, competitive keywords
- Keeps people entering your site hooked to your pages so they can interact with the high quality content you’ve put up in your site
Video SEO also helps build your brand, contributing to the growth of your business while also facilitating conversions and delivering SEO advantages.
Your competitors have probably already started reaping the benefits of video, so you need to get started too. Studies reveal that web pages having videos motivate readers to spend more time at the site, and the benefits are not only felt in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
The Sheer Leverage YouTube Offers You
Remember, YouTube is the most popular platform used for search, after Google. That means people head straight to YouTube to get what they’re looking for, even bypassing Google. So your YouTube channel must be active and you need to post relevant, useful and engaging or exciting videos based on relevant, crucial and competitive keywords. That can help people get to your site from YouTube as well, through the link you put up in the video description.
Check this out – YouTube has more than a billion users. Posting videos on Facebook is important too, since around 500 million people watch videos on Facebook each day. KCPB research had stated that video would make up 74% of online traffic as 2017 ended. One enormous factor contributing to this is the astronomic growth of mobile. Much of the video content online is consumed by mobile users. In fact, it was reported in 2017 that more than half of the views YouTube videos get come from mobile users.
Video Influences User Decisions
For business or retail sites videos are important since Think with Google reports that 50% of prospective buyers check out the service or product videos before actually deciding to visit the store. And stats by Animoto report that customers are 4 times likelier to watch a product video than read about the product. It’s never about words alone in content marketing these days.
As the popularity of video content is continuing to rise, Google’s algorithms give priorities featuring quality video content.
The benefit of having video is therefore multidimensional:
- For one, it helps improve your SERP rankings, and that will bring in unique visitors.
- Once users get to your site, relevant and engaging video content can make them stay on your site long enough for Google to consider it a great site for the particular keyword. That boosts your rankings further.
- As the volume of traffic increases, so does the quality feedback. This helps your site generate greater authority and lasting value.
- All these enable your website to build up authority, attracting quality backlinks generated from other reputable and authoritative sites.
- Social shares would bring in more traffic volume, improving your click-through-rate as well.
In short, video marketing helps SEO directly and indirectly along with improving your brand awareness and visibility. All of these facilitate faster conversions, more than any marketing strategy could help you attain.
Video SEO Best Practices
Here are some cool practices you can employ to truly benefit from the power of video for your SERP performance:
Google wants your website pages to answer the questions users are asking in relation to the services you offer. That’s what boosts your rankings in the SERPs. And video is great at giving answers to questions sought by the audience. In this age of conversational search, your pages must be optimized for every kind of conversational search query people could possibly ask in connection with the keywords or services concerning you, and not just the prosaic keywords. That means your videos must be educational and informative.
- Informational videos need to be your focus now. According to WordTracker’s Gareth Davies, 80% of the video content that appears in the SERPs deals with informational or educational topics. And since people check out these SERP videoson their mobile phones more, your videos need to be created with that in mind.
- Your video must ideally be short, short enough to not extend more than a minute. At least ensure it doesn’t extend for 4 minutes since beyond that users’ engagement rates have been found to fall rapidly. It would be ideal if you could keep it within 30 to 60 seconds. That would keep your audience hooked, provided you have the content that lends value.
- Now that you have a great video, you need to make it easy for Google’s bots to track your video. So you must ensure there are rich-video snippets for easy tracking. You need a great thumbnail and a short description of your video. And you also need a video sitemap for those bots to find your video.
- Make sure you include a transcription of your video with the relevant keywords involved. That helps when Google’s bots crawl your content to find relevant keywords.
Build up your video marketing strategy with the tips above, and make great videos. A professional SEO company can help improve your SEO performance through great videos and their effective implementation, as part of their comprehensive organic SEO services.
